The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr is widely regarded as the foremost Arabic-English bilingual or translation dictionary and has particular usefulness for students of Modern Standard Arabic. The morphology and syntax of written Arabic is essentially the same in all Arabic countries. Unlike many other Arabic-English dictionaries, it arranges each Arabic word according to its consonantal root. Foreign words are listed in straight alphabetical order by first letter (in the Arabic script). Arabicized loanwords, if they can clearly fit under some root, are entered both ways, often with the root entry giving reference to the alphabetical listing. Jump to: navigation, search The Arabic language (; , less formally, ) is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... ... Modern Standard Arabic is the dialect of Arabic used in almost all writing and in formal spoken contexts. ... Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ... Jump to: navigation, search Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (sun, meaning ‘together’) and ταξις (taxis, meaning sequence/order), can be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ... Jump to: navigation, search An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ... A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken into by one language from another. ...

Some features which could be considered drawbacks include the complete lack of indication of word-initial glottal stops or hamza (i.e. the ا vs. أ vs. إ distinction), and the similar ignoring of the distinction between word-final ya ي vs. alif maqsura ى. The dictionary also generally fails to give any concrete example forms of finite derived stem verbs, so that the user must memorize the meaning of the stem numbers ("II" through "X") and reconstruct such verb forms based solely on the stem number and the consonantal root. However every word in the dictionary is transliterated, which is useful for indicating sounds which are sometimes used in Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation, but that cannot be easily represented in standard Arabic script (even with full vowel diacritics), such as [e], [o], [g], and [v]. The presence of these Latin-alphabet transcriptions makes it possible to work out when alif maqsura should be used and when word-final ya in the written orthography (though not when word-initial hamza should be used). Arabic is a Semitic language. ... In the terminology used to discuss the grammar of the Semitic languages, a triliteral is a root containing a sequence of three consonants. ... Transliteration in a narrow sense is a mapping from one system of writing into another. ...

The dictionary was first published in 1961 by publishers Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, Germany. It was inspired by Wehr's German edition Arabisches Wörterbuch fur die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952). In the run up to the publication of the Arabic-English dictionary, the author collated more material in a supplement. In the introduction to the first edition, J. Milton Cowan writes that on seeing the German edition, Hans Wehr gained encouragement from the Committee on Language Programs of the American Council of Learned Societies and Cornell University while the Arabian-American Oil Company provided financial support. Wiesbaden is a city in central Germany. ... Jump to: navigation, search 1952 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... The first edition of a book is generally the product of the first type-setting, but in book collecting it usually refers specifically to the first printing of the first edition, most often a hardback printing. ... The American Council of Learned Societies, founded in 1919, is a private non-profit federation of sixty-eight scholarly organizations. ... Jump to: navigation, search For other uses of the name Cornell, see Cornell (disambiguation). ... Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company) is one of the largest oil companies in the world, and the largest in terms of production (bpd). ...

See also

Modern Standard Arabic, Varieties of Arabic, Fusha (language), Classical Arabic, Varieties of Arabic, Koran, Academy of the Arabic Language, Hans Wehr transliteration Modern Standard Arabic is the dialect of Arabic used in almost all writing and in formal spoken contexts. ... Arabic language has many varieties. ... FusÌ£hÌ£a is a collective term referring to the standardized, non-spoken varieties of the Arabic language, as opposed to the spoken varieties of Arabic. ... Classical Arabic is the form of the Arabic language used in the Quran as well as in numerous literary texts from the same period. ... Arabic language has many varieties. ... The Quran (Arabic al-qurʾān أَلْقُرآن; also transliterated as Quran, Koran, and less commonly Alcoran) is the holy book of Islam. ... The Academy of the Arabic Language (مجمع اللغة العربية) is an academy in Cairo founded in 1934 in order to develop and regulate the Egypt. ... Jump to: navigation, search It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Arabic transliteration. ...

External links

Grant and Cutler language bookshop in London - Sometimes sells small, cheap Syrian editions in hardback

Amazon reviews of the dictionary